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Pledge from new schools
chief: 'No surprises'

By Doug Snover

July 29, 2006

David Schauer, the new superintendent of
the Kyrene Elementary School District,
has been around the district long enough
to recognize its best points and
acknowledge some of its rough edges.

He also realizes there are fences to
mend after the bitter split between the
Kyrene Governing Board and some of the
district’s parents over a controversial
decision to focus on “core” classes in
Kyrene’s middle schools at the expense
of electives such as music and the
performing arts.

Schauer, 53, was named superintendent in
July to succeed Maria Menconi. He has
been with the Kyrene district since 1996
and was assistant superintendent before
Menconi resigned.

“The best things are the kids, the
staff, the support of the
community…we’ve got everything it takes
to be truly great,” Schauer told
Wrangler News recently, looking and
sounding like a diplomat.

“I’ve worked in a number of different
districts in different states and I have
never seen this level of community
support for the work we do. It’s a huge
advantage for us.

“We have a community with a lot of
resources and we need to take full
advantage of it. They want to make a
contribution and they want to know how
to participate.”

But communicating with Kyrene’s
more than 18,500 students and their
parents has been one of the district’s
rough edges, Schauer said.

“What I’ve learned through years of
working here is that a key to our
effectiveness is really communication,”
he said.

“It begins with the internal
organization. With 25 schools and over
2,000 staff and 18,500 kids and all
those families, how we communicate is
extremely important.”

Schauer said he started revamping
Kyrene’s internal communications about
four years ago. Now, as the district's
new chief, he plans to turn his
attention to communicating with the
Kyrene community.

“I think internal communications has
been our biggest problem – our internal
communication mechanisms haven’t been as
effective as they could be,” he said.
“Internally, if you aren’t doing the job
(of communicating) well, what happens is
that a parent might approach a teacher
and that person won’t have an answer” or
might have an answer that isn’t an
informed one, he said.

“Beyond that is how we reach out to the
community,” he said.

“When we did those (middle-school
schedule) changes two years ago, the
community was completely taken by
surprise by the fact that we had come
issues with the budget, that we felt the
need to study certain areas and had felt
that need for a long time.

“It made me realize that we have to do a
much better job of keeping the public
informed about our work and what our
challenges are.”

Schauer said Kyrene has developed a
better system for communicating with its
own staff “but what we don’t have is the
same type of structure with the
community at large.”

In the past, Kyrene’s efforts to
communicate with parents have been
“reactive,” he said.

“I don’t really have a good mechanism to
reach out to parents in a way that I
need to. Parents need to understand what
we’re doing and why,” he said. PTOs and
site councils are there to help but they
are not consistent across the district,
he noted.

“You don’t want people to be surprised
by the things that are going on. You
want them to be informed.”

“People are generally satisfied with
what’s happening in their own school and
their own child, so they won’t
necessarily be involved because things
are going well and they are very busy
people.”

“It went from something that needed to
be improved to something much improved
but still needs more improvement,” he
said instead.

When he was principal at Aprende Middle
School, “Departments here were very
insulated from each other and they work
in isolation and they had competing
agendas…I would often get messages that
weren’t compatible with each other and I
didn’t know what to pay attention to.”

As for rating Kyrene’s way of
communicating with parents, “I think
that’s definitely a problem.”

“I see this as an evolutionary process.
We’re finally, I think, much more
effective internally. Now I can really
start turning my attention to how we
work with the community.”

“We have a group of parents who want to
form a network, and I think that makes a
lot of sense: A parent-driven supportive
network where people are really engaged
in what we’re doing. What I would love
to be able to do right now is to call on
this parent network and say you
represent all the communities in Kyrene
and I need to get a message out so use
your resources and do that.

“I think there’s a lot of work that can
be done in that area. Some of it has
already been started.”

If Schauer envisions a gargantuan task,
it's one he doesn't see doing alone.

“I really like the idea of a
parent-driven organization so we’re not
doing all of that work for them. We have
a lot of parents who have the energy and
the enthusiasm and the resources to want
to do something like this. I think we
can build a system that will work much
better.”

Schauer thinks Kyrene’s changes to the
middle school schedule would have been
difficult under any circumstances.

But he said the district could have
handled the difficult issue with better
communication.

“I think it still would have been
difficult because it was changes for
kids. I think where a difference could
have come in is if people would have
understood what we were trying to do and
why, it might have been easier to go
through it.

“The fact that a lot of our parents were
taken by surprise is not a good thing.”